Movie Review | 'Safe Conduct'

Delicate Moral Questions Under the Nazis in France

By ELVIS MITCHELL

Published: October 8, 2002

Bertrand Tavernier is not often thought of as a man of passion. Even "Round Midnight," his 1986 film on an alienated bop musician, seemed remote and grim textured. His enthusiasms are evident from the subjects he chooses rather than their substance; with the exception of the artful and laconic "A Sunday in the Country," they serve mainly as a backdrop. But in "Safe Conduct," this French filmmaker's newest work, which will be shown today and Thursday at the New York Film Festival, the heat of the moment prevails. It cooks "Conduct" in a low, smoky and inviting sizzle.

Heavy with incident and running nearly three hours, "Conduct" follows the attempts of the French film industry to stay alive during the Nazi occupation. The characters are constantly asking questions about the nature of art: whether it deserves to continue through such a time and how fine is the line between ambition and opportunism? But Mr. Tavernier stages the movie like a dance marathon, intelligently shifting the pace and scale of the drama. The movie is full of juices that give it a healthy, pungent flow.

"Safe Conduct" is likable because the people here aren't archetypes. As they pose weighty questions of moral choice to themselves, they have to keep working and eating, too. There's a compelling desperation, something Mr. Tavernier has brought to the screen with only intermittent success before. Working with material based on actual events and with characters who really existed and had to balance the horror of living under the shadow of the Nazis with conducting their own lives has given the director a new lease on life.

Mr. Tavernier keeps the story hopping by segueing smoothly between the lives of two men, an assistant director, Jean Devaivre (Jacques Gamblin), and a screenwriter, Jean Aurenche (Denis Podalydès). Both men work for Continental Films, a movie company financed by the Germans. (The Nazis had offices at the studio and regularly looted resources for their own needs.)

The director treats them as two wholly different types, with wildly varying temperaments. Aurenche is a bubbly improviser who bounces from clinch to clinch, looking for women he can seduce and ears into which he can whisper his entreaties for work. At the start of "Conduct" (which opens Friday in Manhattan), he's trying to complete a conquest — and Mr. Tavernier gives this scene the busy chirpiness of a screwball comedy sequence until Aurenche's companion gazes out the window as Paris is being bombed. Mr. Tavernier makes so many varied beats play in this scene that you feel he's never been this engaged as a filmmaker.

Devaivre's is the more conventional story. He's really the hero: a family man devoted to his friends and a thoughtful crew member who's obviously a director in the making. He sharply and modestly solves problems for the film director, Maurice Tourneur (Philppe Morier-Genoud), a soft-voiced, heavy-shouldered papa bear of a man who is one of the many real-life figures that populate the film.

Devaivre is also a member of the Resistance and labors to keep all the various aspects of his life in working order. The strain is evident; he looks exhausted when we meet him and there's much more to come. Mr. Gamblin plays him as a man whose essential decency is a compulsion; he has to do what's right. If that requires his jumping on his bicycle to ride hundreds of miles to see his wife and child, who are hidden in the countryside, or taking that same bicycle to help get plans of an invasion to the Allies, he'll take the honorable course without a second thought.

Mr. Gamblin brings a piquant complexity to the role; he's not just duty-bound but a man whose honest amiability is branded with empathy. He can see himself in others, unlike the raffish predator Aurenche, who sees what he can get out of others. (That makes this Aurenche, who in real life later worked with Tavernier, comic relief.) This side of Mr. Gamblin plays especially well when Devaivre finds himself trying to communicate with the R.A.F. in London after a journey calling for a train, a plane and, of course, his bike. The sheer nuttiness of the day is alleviated by a quotidian absurdity; Devaivre, shivering with fever and choking down mugs of English tea, has to get back to Paris in time for work.

Mr. Tavernier leans into powerful, contradictory chords in "Safe Conduct," alluding to the irony of French filmmakers getting the chance to make more emotionally mature films under the Germans than during French rule. Devaivre defends Henri-Georges Clouzot's free-swinging "Le Corbeau." (As long as the pictures didn't criticize the Nazis, the Germans didn't care.)

For all its virtues, the movie finally slumps under its Brobdingnagian length. The picture has the reach of an epic, accomplishing a great deal on what was surely a limited budget, but inevitably it has the sprawl of an epic, too. Still, for a sizable portion of its running time, the movie allows the director to show us a range of life and feeling that grew out of his love of film, the elemental force that keeps the world of "Conduct" spinning.

SAFE CONDUCT

Directed by Bertrand Tavernier; written (in French, with English subtitles) by Jean Cosmos and Mr. Tavernier; director of photography, Alain Choquart; edited by Sophie Brunet; music by Antoine Duhamel; production designer, Émile Ghigo; produced by Alain Sarde and Frédéric Bourboulon; released by Empire Pictures. Running time: 170 minutes. This film is not rated. Shown tonight and Thursday at 8:45 p.m. at Alice Tully Hall, 165 West 65th Street, Lincoln Center, as part of the 40th New York Film Festival.